Japanese Pilgrimage: The City of the Dead

In order to attain serenity of mind and become a person who is like the clouds in the sky and the whirling snow, consider that everyone's fate is to be become a corpse.                                                                           -- Kobo Daishi (Kukai) translated by Nobuhiro Tamura

It is night-time, and we are walking through an immense and ancient graveyard. All around us, the huge, straight trunks of 600-year-old cryptomeria, trees, like giant coast redwoods, rise up and disappear into the darkness above, so it feels that we are walking through a forest rather than a graveyard. Stone memorials line the wide pathway where we walk, and continue beneath the trees to either side, as far as can be seen. Some monuments are fresh and white, perhaps only a few years old, while others are covered in a deep layer of moss. Some are massive and pretentious; others are humble, clustered together and leaning toward one another like whispering children. The remains of 200,000 people from the last 1,100 years are all around us.

It is very quiet, except for the chitters of the flying squirrels, high in the trees above. Our little group speaks nearly in whispers as we walk in the dark: it doesn't seem like a place for raised voices. Unlike a cemetery in the West, there are no bodies here, or even the ashes from cremations. Beneath each stone memorial is a single bone: the nodobotoke, or Buddha bone, a small bone from the neck, shaped like a seated Buddha, carefully separated from the rest of the ashes after cremation.

This is my introduction to the Okunoin cemetery on Mount Koya, one of the most sacred places in all of Japan, where the spirits of commoners, samurai, monks and aristocrats have all lain down together in silence beneath the great trees.

We walk a gentle uphill slope through the dark graveyard, and across a series of small bridges. Before the third bridge, the monk who is guiding us, Nobuhiro Tamura, stops and tells us solemnly that beyond the bridge is the heart of Mount Koya, the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi, or Kukai, the 9th century monk and teacher who brought Shingon Buddhism - esoteric Buddhism -  from China to Japan. Kobo Daishi founded the first monasteries on Mount Koya, at 2,600 feet in the remote wilderness mountains of southern Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago. Since the 9th century this place has been the heart of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, and once had more than 1,000 temples nestled between its eight mountain peaks. The whole complex is like an immense mandala, and at the center of the mandala is the Okunoin graveyard and the mausoleum.

Our monk/guide tells us that it is believed that in the year 835, when he was 61 years old, Kobo Daishi walked into that mausoleum, sat down in meditation, and has been in a deep meditative state ever since, for 1,178 years. He has been receiving teachings in the Tushita heaven from the next Buddha, Maitreya. When he wakes and speaks, he will give the greatest sermon the world has ever known, and that's why 200,000 people have chosen Mount Koya for the final resting place of their Buddha bone, so they can be there when the great sermon is given.

The lonely cloud has no path home, and loves a distant peak. I don't claim to know worldly things; I just watch the moon and lie down beneath a green pine.                                                                                    - Kobo Daishi (Kukai), translated by Nobuhiro Tamura

 (This poem by Kukai is particularly touching to me because there is a kind of beautiful conifer on Mount Koya called the Koya pine, or Japanese umbrella pine, known as the koyamaki in Japanese. I walked beneath it in the mountains around Mount Koya and saw many offerings of its branches on altars and on memorials in the cemetery. It is a living fossil, a species more than 230 million years old with no known close relatives. It is also one of the five sacred trees of Japan. There are so many koyamaki around Mount Koya that I can only imagine that it was this kind of pine that Kukai lay down beneath, illuminated by moonlight, so long ago.)

Offerings of koyamaki

Our group of Zen pilgrims (17 Canadians and me) stayed in a temple on Mount Koya, Ekoin, for two nights. (To learn more about our pilgrimage, read this.)

There are still more than a hundred temples clustered in a high valley amidst the peaks of Mount Koya, and a thousand monks and nuns, and Shingon pilgrims come from all over Japan and walk (or more frequently, ride the vertiginous tram) up the steep mountainside to stay for a night or two in a temple, along with curious Japanese and Western tourists. It might be possible to visit Mount Koya, eat some good temple food (and Japanese vegetarian temple cooking is deservedly famous), buy a few souvenirs, gawk at the famous gravestones in the cemetery,and get back on the tram and go home, relatively unmoved. But I found that the place, and the teachings there, seeped into me like pure mountain water, so even without understanding Shingon, I found myself moved, opened, and touched by something without name.

Perhaps we were also lucky. Our guide that first night in the graveyard was a young, very sincere monk from the temple where we were staying. Nobuhiro-san speaks and writes English. Here are some of the notes I took, as he offered his understanding to us, standing in the dark in the Okunoin:

"The purpose of Shingon meditation is to understand that 'inside' and 'outside', which we normally think of as opposed to one another, are actually one thing....Buddha Nature is everywhere...What makes esoteric Buddhism 'esoteric' is that the teachings cannot be really properly spoken in language. Instead, they are hidden in the world -- in the moon, in plants and trees and animals. The world is speaking the teachings....Kobo Daishi said that our minds are like the moon. The moon is bright because of the sun's rays, and our minds are bright because of the primordial sun Buddha. Just as the moon appears to change from day to day, so do our minds, but actually it is always the full moon, clear and bright."  - Nobuhiro Tamura

Wagtail on a painted fusuma door at Ekoin temple

But there was another side to our time there. Until 100 years ago, half of our group would not have been allowed to enter the precincts of Koyasan. I would not have been allowed to enter. From the 9th century until 1870, no living woman entered this most sacred place.

At each of the entrances to Mount Koya there was a women's hall where nuns practiced, always outside the gates. There is a path of many miles that leads from one gate to another, skirting the very edge of the sacred area, and this was the women's pilgrimage route, as close as any woman pilgrim could come to the center of the mandala, that mausoleum where Kobo Daihsi sits in meditation in the valley far below.

Three of us on our pilgrimage were ordained women priests, and we three decided to walk the women's pilgrimage trail. We began at the only surviving women's hall, the Niyonindo, where we read about Kosugi, who founded the hall:

According to an old story, there once was a young woman named Kosugi who lived at an inn in the province of Echigo. Her life was full of hardship, but she was saved by Kobo Daishi. Kosugi became a nun and opened here, at the top of the Fudo slope, along one of the pilgrim roads leading into Koyasan, the first so-called "women's hall". She looked after women pilgrims, who at the time were not allowed to enter Koyasan. Kosugi is now venerated as Kosugimyojin, a guardian deity of the Nyonindo hall.

We spent a day on the steep, up-and-down trail, often in silence, considering those women who had walked here for a thousand years in prayer, those women who had lived in the nun's halls, helping the weary pilgrims as they reached the gates, watching the men pass through, the women stay outside, century after century. Only one of the women's halls still stands, but at each place where there had been an entrance and a hall, we stood in silence, considering.

The following photos are from the women's pilgrimage route.

Reproduction of old map of women's pilgrimage route

The outside of Daimon, the grand gateway, with the guardian deities on either side. A woman could not cross through.

Kate McCandless on the women's pilgrimage route, beneath a koyamaki

A view to the main temple precincts from the women's pilgrimage trail

Irises at the Niyonindo nun's hall

A Jizo shrine along the trail. Women often pray to Jizo for children lost to miscarriage, abortion or early death.

From right to left: Kate McCandless, Flo Rublee, and me (buried under the hat), at one of the gates where a women's hall once stood.

On our last morning I returned to the Okunoin, the great graveyard, this time in daylight, and wandered among the stones in early morning light. I had brought a brush and black ink with me on the trip, and I sat on a mossy root and sketched the leaning stones, the tree trunks, the offerings of Koya pine.

I found that I could both celebrate the grandeur of a place of such deep practice and great piety, and mourn the way it had excluded women for so long. I don't really understand - how can I understand, from the viewpoint of a woman of the 21st century? - but I know that the practice of Koyasan did not stop at its gates, that the gates themselves, and the women who lived at the gates, were integral to the mandala.

I wish I could meet one of those women who sat outside the gates for a lifetime, waking up as she served the pilgrims. I wish I could do three bows to her, offer incense to her, and tell her that her practice inspires this woman of the future, as I walk the hills she walked, stand in the place where she once stood.

And really, as Kobo Daishsi himself taught, "inside and outside are the same."

A statue in the Okunoin graveyard

Clear streams on the mountain never stop flowing with compassion.                                                                                             - Kobo Daishi (Kukai), translated by Nobuhiro Tamura                                                                                              

Running the Edge of the World

Tokeland, Willapa Bay Southern Washington Coast ---

For the last sunny week or so I've been running barefoot on the big beaches to the north of here. Running's new - it's been a long time since I've been well enough to run - and running barefoot along the wet shiny salt-spray-and-wind edge of the continent is wholly new. The sand is packed hard from the breakers, almost as hard as pavement, and the shorebirds dash wildly into and out of the waves, just as I veer inland when a big wave comes in. Otherwise I like to run where the waves spread out into a fine mirror for the sky, my feet splashing in the shallow sheet of water.

Everything is reduced down to just a few "things", almost not things at all - sand    ocean    line of dunes   shorebirds   terns    sun   sky. There's a sense of edge, but not a hard edge - a constantly shifting, literally fluid edge.  Running the edge of the world.

James Swan, in his record from 1851 of the earliest white settlement of this part of the coast, writes about traveling along this very beach from Grays Harbor to "Shoalwater Bay" (now Willapa Bay). Inland were huge dark cedar and spruce forests, deep bogs, steep hills - but a person could drive a coach and four horses down the hard-packed open sand. Washington beaches are still classified as "public highways" - a legacy of the time, not so long ago, when they were the only way up and down the wet and wild Pacific coast.

I say "this very beach" but the beach I've been running on is called Washaway Beach. It's the fastest eroding shoreline in North America. What is beach now was once land, just a few years ago. Hundreds of feet of coastline a year disappear into the ocean, houses that were once well inland now stand tipped nearly over the edge of the sandy bank, the entire town of North Cove (church, coast guard station, cemetery) occupied a sandy peninsula now entirely underwater, where Pacific waves break at low tide, the graves moved inland, bones and headstones and all. Where I run this year will be ocean next year, the edge moving inexorably inland.

So what beach do I run on? Do I run on James Swan's beach? Where is the edge?

This time of year the shorebirds are just beginning to return from their far northern nesting grounds, some to stay here for the winter, others to go south south south, unimaginably far south. They're tired. Today I saw a whole group resting beside the waves, little white balls of feathers, heads tucked in, a gull presiding over them. I run a long way around the shorebirds. The last thing they need is to have to fly unnecessarily, after what they've been through. I cringe when I see a dog on the beach, joyously chasing them.

Right now it's all semipalmated plovers and sanderlings, the plovers gazing meditatively off into the middle distance, the sandlerings running like wind-up toys back and forth from one good feeding area to another, flying up together like a school of silvery fish flickering in the air. It took me about a half an hour to move slowly slowly up to a group of sanderlings today, to get close enough to see what they were with my small binoculars, but slow enough not to spook them.

This is why I don't want to spook them - the plovers have just arrived from their nesting grounds in the Arctic and subarctic, and they're headed south for the winter. Some of them are headed to....hang on to your hat here....Patagonia. More of the sanderlings stay around for the winter, but they nest even farther north, only in the High Arctic above the Arctic Circle, and some of them migrate 5,000 miles or more to South America. This is serious flying for birds smaller than a robin. I don't even travel that far, wanderer that I am.

So the shorebirds and I share the beach, all of us travelers, here for a little while before we head south, and the beautiful Caspian terns fly overhead staring into the water and croaking "like a crow being strangled" (as a friend of mine described them). When it's windy the dry sand moves in a fine sheet across the hard-packed wet sand, and the effect is mesmerizing, like running in a shallow desert river.

There is a joy that can seize a person in a place like that, running in the wind in all that space and light. I'm not sure where it comes from, or why it arrives. The spirit grows wide, spreading itself out. There's nothing outside that brightness, for a while.







 


                                                                         

All At Once

Isn't it strange, the way so many things are happening at the same moment? At this moment,as I write this or you read this, an inconceivable number of events are occurring: someone is experiencing the greatest happiness, another the greatest grief; there is an avalanche cascading down a mountain slope and somewhere else a light rain has begun to fall; a small creature is being born and another creature is dying; a new star is forming, and somewhere another star is winking out, its light and heat fading away into darkness. All at once.

Yesterday and the day before I experienced this mystery with particular vividness. Thursday night I was reading from Wildbranch at a local bookstore with two of the book's contributors. It was a lovely night, and local friends came out to hear us. I shared a story from a reader of the book, who had told me that she had given up reading environmental literature because it was too depressing, but she had realized that Wildbranch was about love, love and intimacy with our world, and love is a more potent force for action than despair. I felt so happy about the book and what it offers, so happy to be sharing it and reading from many contributors.

I came home from the reading to the news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which had happened as we read. 

I was up much of the night, knowing that there could be a tsunami on the west coast of North America, and concerned for my little retreat cabin a few feet above high water on the Washington coast, my neighbor and her children, and my sweet friends who were staying in the cabin that night. I knew enough about tsunamis to know that they can cross whole oceans in a matter of hours without much diminution of their force. I knew that the county had called for an evacuation of all houses at sea level, including mine and those of my neighbors.

Several of us at the reading had arranged to go hiking the next day. The next morning I left for the hike before the time that the first major waves would come ashore. I had reached my friends who were staying at the cabin, and they had left and driven back to their own home, safely above sea level, but I didn't know what would happen to the cabin and the small community around it, all of which sits just a few feet above sea level on a narrow peninsula on Willapa Bay, a stone's throw from the open ocean and the roaring surf. I've always known that it is vulnerable to an event just like this one. Would this be the time?

Then, for the next few hours, I was hiking and looking at spring wildflowers, and I don't know what happened, except that the four of us on the hike fell into a kind of grace, one of those times of magical ease and beauty, unlooked-for, unrepeatable, perfect.

It was a clear, sunny spring day after rain, the air soft and subtly misty, the ground exhaling its moisture. Our trail started high up on Mount Tamalpais, then descended the open west-facing slopes of the mountain, views far out over the ocean, north to Bolinas and south to the very tops of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The grass - not just the grass, but everything, every tree, shrub, herb and moss - was deeply, brilliantly green, the hallucinatory green of March in the coastal hills. After a while the the trail entered the redwoods and turned upward again, following waterfall after waterfall back up the mountain, up mossy stone stairways.

Some of us in our little group of four knew each other well, over many years; others were just acquaintances. Two Zen practitioners, three writing teachers, one botanist. What we shared was our love of literature and the natural world, and this moment together. We talked and walked and admired flowers and mushrooms and the light through the redwoods. We took photographs and shared gingerbread and homemade coffee cake by the side of the creek. We told stories. We wandered on and off the trail. I left my walking stick by a flower and then it reappeared, leaning against a railing on an entirely different trail. The day unfolded with a kind of ease that only happens now and again, in dreams or, if we're lucky, for a few hours in waking life.

The whole time I didn't know what had become of the only place I can call home, whether the sturdy little white cottage underneath the Sitka spruce was filled with muddy water as I walked the hills, or still sitting quietly in the rain, unharmed and whole. Or what might be happening in Japan or elsewhere all along the edge of the Pacific. There was nothing I could do, but I didn't forget, and it gave a subtly different feeling to the day for me, a kind of strangeness that made the light more brilliant and the grace more poignant.

When I got back to town, many hours later, I heard from my neighbor that everything was fine. She talked about how the day had been for her, also not knowing, waiting, and the gratitude she felt for the simple gift of being fine, of having a house and safe children, of making a pot of soup and starting a fire in the woodstove. How often do any of us remember to be grateful for our lives as they are, in all their ordinary details?

Meanwhile, across the ocean, thousands of people are still missing. Tonight, as I write this, people are huddled in makeshift shelters, mourning their homes, their friends and relatives, their pets, the lives they once had - lives that can be rebuilt but which will never be the same. And I sit here, still bathed in a sense of well-being from my day in the hills, feeling happiness for what was not destroyed in my life. These things exist side by side, utterly connected and yet also independent of one another.

I read tonight that the Dalai Lama has asked people in Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile for more than fifty years, to chant the Heart Sutra 100,000 times for the people of Japan and all who are suffering disaster.

The Heart Sutra says "form does not differ from emptiness, and emptiness does not differ from form." Another way of saying it is that I am, at the same time, both an individual with a history and an experience that is uniquely my own, and completely connected. I am affected by an earthquake across an ocean from me, and yet walked the hills as others suffered and died. We breathe air that has been in the lungs of a lion, the stomata of 300-year-old coast live oak, the nose of Buddha, but when we breathe, only we can breathe our breath, this one irreplaceable, unrepeatable breath

And on the day I die, there will almost certainly be someone walking those hills I walked yesterday, bending to look at a wildflower, smiling at a friend, breathing in the clean ocean air. We will share that moment, not knowing each other, linked inextricably.

Southeast Alaska - First Glimpse

I'm back from three and a half weeks of work in Southeast Alaska, where I hunted rare plants as part of a team of botanists on the Tongass National Forest.

We worked on mountaintops, cliffs, salt marshes, beaches, bogs, lakes, meadows and old growth Sitka spruce forests on about a half dozen islands west of Ketchikan, most of which most people have never heard of: Prince of Wales Island (the fourth largest island in the US), Heceta Island, Whalehead Island, Blashke Island, Kosciusko Island, and Tuxekan Island, all in the Alexander Archipelago, made up of over a thousand islands off the west coast of the Alaskan mainland.

This was my first trip to Alaska. I've avoided Alaska all this years because -- and I'm just going to be really honest about this -- I'M AFRAID OF BEARS. I'm somewhat rational about this: I'm much more afraid of grizzlies than I am of black bears. But I'm also embarrassingly afraid of black bears. Embarrassing because as a field biologist for nearly twenty-five years, I should know better, or at least be a little less paranoid than some city slicker. I wouldn't have taken the job if it had been in grizzly country, but Prince of Wales only has black bears. More about bears later.

As a Southeast Alaska newbie, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had ideas - large bearded men, rain, insects, wildlife, big trees. But it's a long way from one's ideas about a place to the actual, living place. Still, some of my ideas were more or less accurate....

Large bearded men? Check - although there weren't many people on Prince of Wales, where there were men, they tended to be large and scruffy and bearded, though quite friendly. (Here's an Alaska joke for single women: "The odds are good but the goods are odd.") It's a guys' place, with an emphasis on functionality and a de-emphasis on aesthetics. In the few tiny settlements, trucks lay rotting in the weeds, minus their tires (imagine the difficulty and expense of getting a dead truck off a remote island); houses looked like they'd been put up in an afternoon a half century ago and never painted again, and blue tarps reigned supreme. One is visible as a make-shift door in the photo below. There was even a spectacular collection of enormous, long-abandoned and rusted logging equipment, called, with some heavy irony, "The Logging Museum".

The Ruff-It General Store, accessible only by boat. Whale Pass, Prince of Wales Island

Rain? Check - it rained nearly every day we were working, and on the rare days when it wasn't raining or drizzling, the underbrush was so wet that it might as well have been raining. We never really dried out, just like everything and everyone else there. The whole place is dripping wet, a great big sponge soaking up the North Pacific storms. About half the "land" is muskeg, which is essentially a spot that hasn't dried out since the last Ice Age, covered in layers of peat and sphagnum moss and carnivorous plants and little ponds and too wet even for most trees. There is no point to wearing any clothing other than layers of fleece, and no point wearing any footgear other than high rubber boots (more on those later too), preferably ones with cork spikes in the bottom ot prevent slipping off the giant wet mossy logs that must be clambered over to get anywhere.

That's me, in XtraTuf boots and rain-gear, walking through a saltmarsh.

Photo by Emily Drew.

Insects? They weren't as bad as I had feared, except for "white socks", little flies that removed chunks of flesh from our faces and necks, then worked their way under our clothing. I wouldn't know I'd been bitten (they must inject some anesthetic) until I touched my face and felt dried streams of blood. Sometime after the initial bite - hours or days later - the spot would begin to swell and itch. The itch would build to a nearly unbearable intensity, and all our faces were swollen and bloody, like sixteen-year-olds with terminal acne. It lasted about a week, until the next set of fly bites.

Me again, bug-netted, trying to document a rare plant location in a skunk cabbage swamp.

Photo by Emily Drew.

And bears? What Prince of Wales Island lacks in grizzlies, it makes up for in black bears, which like everything in Southeast - trees, slugs, devils-club, skunk cabbage - are prone to a certain gigantism. The bears on Prince of Wales are the largest black bears in North America. And like the rain, they are everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. Big piles of dark bear scat litter the sides of main roads, line every game trail, stand like proud monuments out in the middle of meadows, and even show up on the tops of mountains. It doesn't seem possible that any animal smaller than an elephant could produce such humongous dumps. I can't even begin to express how large these things are - the scat that is, not to mention the bears themselves, which we encountered nearly every day.

Despite an ecological understanding of the importance of large carnivores, I have to admit that I prefer my woods without bears, or, if there are bears, I prefer my bears to be secretive and shy. The bears OWN Southeast Alaska, as far as I could tell.

All that aside, though - even as I chronically damp, nervous, and covered in intensely itchy welts - every day was a wonder, an amazing encounter with a land and creatures beyond what I had ever imagined seeing. I feel grateful and lucky to have had the opportunity to work in those primeval forests, on uninhabited islands, in a dreamlike place of mists and water.

It's been hard to begin to write about it, perhaps because the scale of the experience was so large, so multi-layered. I pull one thread and a whole island lands in my lap, mud and moss and forests and all. Or perhaps because it was so far beyond what I've experienced before - flying in a small helicopter a few hundred feet above the ocean, listening to the breathing of humpback whales, walking alone along the edge of a cliff, standing in places where there is no one else for many miles, happening upon courting, bugling sandhill cranes in hidden meadows.

I hardly know how to share it. I think the only way is in little glimpses, vignettes, like getting on to one's hands and knees and looking at the moss gardens in the muskeg, up close.

So, in the next series of posts, over the next few weeks, Southeast Alaska, glimpsed.

In the Deep Midwinter

We all have our ways of celebrating the winter holidays. Some ways are more eccentric than others, I'll admit. This year I spent the day after Christmas looking for birds from dawn to dusk. The next day, the 27th of December, I spent the whole day in a silent retreat led by a Theravadan Buddhist nun. I've been thinking about these two days and how, mysteriously, they reflect one another. Each was a day of silence, of careful awareness, of gratitude, and of giving.

My bird-watching day was no random event: I was participating in the Christmas Bird Count, a census of birds in the western hemisphere that has been conducted annually over a few weeks in mid-winter by the Audubon Society for more than a hundred years.

According to the Audubon website, the count was begun in 1900 by an early bird conservationist, Frank Chapman, as an alternative to Christmas "side hunts" where hunters competed against each other in teams for the largest number of birds killed in a day. Now more than 50,000 volunteers in 17 countries participate in the count, and the results are used by ornithologists and conservation organizations to monitor the health of bird populations in their winter ranges.

I did the count with a friend, and we were assigned to an area of about one by seven miles in the hills above Bolinas Lagoon, out on the outer coast just north of San Francisco. Our day began at about 5:15 am - hours before either of us normally wakes up - followed by a groggy breakfast and a drive in the dark across the hills to the coast.

We're relative neophytes, so we were paired with two more experienced birders - an ecologist and an ornithologist - whom we met just before dawn in a muddy parking lot near the lagoon.

After minimal introductions, we headed up into the hills in silence, all four of us listening intently to the tweets and chirps and little sounds all around us in the dim woodland, though really only two of us (guess which two?) knew what they were hearing. Every few minutes someone would see something and we would all be peering into the tangle with our binoculars, trying to see a sparrow or a towhee or whatever might be lurking there, keeping a count of how many birds of each species we saw or - in the case of our companions - heard.

And so the day went, mostly in silence, hiking on or off trail through the canyons filled with coast live oak (and poison oak) or willow and bay, sometimes up in the chaparral or grassland of the open hills, sometimes all four of us together and sometimes split apart, each one of us completely intent on seeing and counting, eyes and ears and senses fully engaged, not stopping to eat or chat or even sit down. It was cold and gray, and in the afternoon it started to rain, first gently and then with determination, and we kept working as long as we could, until the rain came down so heavily in the early dusk that we were blinded and the birds were essentially invisible.

Part of what I loved about the day was the way that EACH BIRD MATTERED. In ordinary birdwatching, when I see one kinglet, I'm pleased, but the next one I see doesn't matter so much, and by the tenth I'm usually oblivious. But in the Christmas Bird Count, each raven, each crow, each jay matters, no matter how common, no matter how many have been seen before. Ah, if only we treated everything this way!

After a nine hour day in the cold and rain and muck, We drove back across the foggy slopes of Mt. Tamalpais to a warm cafe where we sat and drank hot chocolate, still in our wet jackets, still completely focused on the count. We added up what we had seen: sixty-three species, about average for a Christmas Bird Count in this area.

For each species our leader added up our individual counts, "Robins?" he would say, "how many robins?", and each of us would peer at our wet notebooks and scribbled, pencilled, nearly illegible numbers. "Sixteen, no, wait a minute, that's twenty, with those four I saw near the farmhouse," remembering the bright birds high up in the trees like so many orange Christmas ornaments. "Kestrels?" and we would get into a brief discussion about whether MY two kestrels were the same or different birds than the ones someone else had seen hovering like tiny kites above the hills.

Then we all shook hands and went our separate ways out into the dark. Our little count will be added to the count for all of southern Marin County, and that will be added to counts all across the hemisphere, and someday someone might comb through the data, noticing that this year, like the last few, no oak titmice were seen on the Marin coast, another population winked out, or our fleeting glimpse of a peregrine might tell a researcher that peregrines still hunt the flocks of ducks out in Bolinas Lagoon, a conservation victory after the birds came so close to extinction.

Strange to know that what felt so inconsequential - our day of effort counting robins and chickadees - would be added into a grand continental pattern created by thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of birds, a tapestry across time and space and the usual barriers between species. Even now as I write this there are people out with binoculars and spotting scopes, perhaps in your neighborhood, looking up into the trees, recording the often unnoticed life that fills the air with song and flight.

***************************

The next morning I woke up early again and drove to Spirit Rock Meditation Center, part way back toward the coast. Another gray, foggy day. The grassy hills of Spirit Rock were lost in the cold fog, but inside the meditation hall a hundred people or more sat quietly on chairs or cushions. At the front of the room were two striking women, both with shaved heads, one in brown robes, one in white: Ajahn (which means teacher) Anandabodhi and a novice nun, Anagarika Santussika.

Ajahn Anandabodhi and two other siladharas (nuns that take ten precepts, including celibacy, not handling money, depending entirely on alms, and eating only once per day) just arrived in San Francisco to start the first Buddhist nun's community in North America (Saranaloka).

Photo from Saranaloka website

The nuns, who are British, come from a monastery in Great Britain, the only one I know of in the west that trains nuns as well as monks. Although a women's order of nuns has been part of the Buddhist world since the time of the Buddha, the history of women renunciants is a history of marginalization. In many parts of Asia the women's order has died out altogether; in other areas women practice as nuns but in desperate poverty, not supported by lay people in the same ways that monks are, and often not empowered to teach.

As a consequence of this sad history, in all my years of meditation practice with many teachers, I had never been taught by a Buddhist nun before this midwinter day. I sat down near the front and listened as the Ajahn gave basic meditation instructions, struck by her clarity and steadiness. Then the hall settled into silence, silent sitting alternating with silent walking out under the dripping trees.

Usually at one day retreats each person brings their own bag lunch, but for this event, which was also offered without charge (monks and nuns cannot charge for the teachings), we were invited to bring something to share and to offer to the nuns, since they can only eat what is explicitly offered. At about 11 AM, when the nuns eat their one meal for the day, Ajahn Anandabodhi came and received the individual dishes from those of us who had brought an offering, gently taking the dish from our hands and placing it on the tables. Then she and her novice nun offered a meal blessing. Afterward we all went through the line, sharing the bounty of a hundred gifts to one another.

I've written before of how moved I am when I see the power of generosity, and this day I felt it very deeply, almost to tears, seeing both the radical trust of these women's lives, and the tremendous kindness of my fellow retreatants. It was particularly poignant to know that after two thousand years of being pushed aside, ordained women could now step forward with their gifts and be appreciated, even celebrated.

This is the best of us as human beings, I think, this generosity, just as the generosity and caring of the Christmas Bird Count represents the best of us - crazy people willing to go out in all weather in the depth of winter while their friends and relatives are at the mall or in front of the television, all for the sake of the birds of our world.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in silence and attention, just as I had the day before, though my attention was on breath and silence itself, rather than birdsong and movement, and I was grateful to be drier (!). When I walked outside, once again I saw each crow, each jay, each black phoebe, and almost without thinking found myself counting them, amused and glad at the way that my vision had been clarified by the day before.

These two worlds are both my worlds - the world of inner attention and the world of birds and trees and fog....I am so grateful for both of them, and for the people who share my love for them.

In the depths of winter, nourishment and renewal.

"The Mountains Belong to Those Who Love Them"

The Zen wanderer has temporarily alighted on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, the guardian mountain that stands to the northwest of San Francisco Bay.

“Mt. Tam”, as people say around here, has been an important place to me for a couple of decades now. Green Gulch Farm, my home temple for many years, lies on its southwestern flanks in a narrow valley that leads to Muir Beach; Spirit Rock, where I’ve spend so much time in silence, lies to the north of the mountain, and on a clear day I would climb up to the ridge about the retreat center and gaze at Mt. Tam on the southern horizon.

I’ve wandered its great grassy green flowery western meadows above the Pacific, walked a pilgrimage route around it, sat with friends on the serpentine outcrops high on its slopes, slept in the dark on its northwestern flank and then woken up in deep fog, toasted the moon with wine at Inspiration Point (and gotten a ticket for being up on the peak too late), and a hundred other adventures, large and small. So now, to find myself living on the ridge above Blythedale Canyon, looking north and west to the peak of the mountain, so close it feels like I could run my hands along its rough chaparral-covered slopes…well, it’s a wonderful thing.

I’m in a studio surrounded by manzanita and coast live oak, near the end of the road and the beginning of the wild country.

My landlords are below me, in a hand-built Japanese-style house that Ed Ross, who is now 94, mostly designed and built himself, starting 60 years ago. He was an entomologist for the California Academy of Sciences for many decades, and crisscrossed India and Africa and South America and nearly everywhere else through much of the 20th century. Ed is also an extraordinary photographer, with hundreds of striking, powerful images of indigenous people from all over the world. I feel very lucky to be here for the next few months, on this land that Ed and his wife Sandy love and care for so well, sitting and writing and looking at the mountain.

Last Sunday I drove around the mountain to Green Gulch for the weekly public talk, this one given by Hoitsu Suzuki, the 70-year-old son of the late Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, founded the San Francisco Zen Center, and brought Soto Zen to the West. Hoitsu stayed in Japan when his father came to America in 1959, and has lived a mostly quiet life as a temple priest at the temple that he inherited from his father.

He is my dharma great-grandfather: my teacher, Norman Fischer, was given dharma transmission (full ordination as a priest) by Mel Weitsman the abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, who was given dharma transmission by Hoitsu. So when I hear him speak, I feel like I’m hearing my great-grandfather speak. In Zen, the “feeling”, or “flavor” of a particular lineage tends to persist, and I think the flavor of Hoitsu is very gentle and warm, very unassuming and humble, “nothing special”.

Much to my delight, he talked about mountains, and what Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen in the 13th century, had to say about mountains. “The mountains belong to those who love them” is a quote from Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra (which could be translated as, "The Teachings Spoken by Mountains and Rivers”). Dogen also said that mountains are walking – we just can’t see their walking. We see what we can see, and to our little, short-lived species, mountains are static, monumental, still. But is Mt. Tam still? It is bird song and leaf-fall, underground waters, the shifting of stone, the rattle of pebbles off the trail, clouds coming and going, darkness and light and darkness and light again – with just a little shift of perception, Mt. Tam breathes and shrugs its great shoulders, gazing over the Pacific to the Farallones, breathing with me as I perch here, like a small bird in a great big tree.

Even more wonderfully, Hoitsu talked about the spirit of zazen, or meditation. He started by saying that zazen is inhalation and exhalation. And indeed it is – the breath, and the breath within the body, and the awareness of body and breath. But then he said something else. He said that zazen is also a soft, warm heart.

“A soft, warm heart”. What we do is not just what we do, or what we focus on, but the spirit we bring to it. This is true of anything, but particularly of spiritual practices. We can do a spiritual practice perfectly, but if the spirit is cold and judgmental, no amount of perfection will bring grace, to oneself or anyone else.

So that’s what I carried with me as I got up from the talk last Sunday. To remember the soft, warm heart that lives at the heart of our lives, always possible, with every breath.

Meanwhile the crows are cawing, and the wind has come up. I can see it moving the gnarled branches of the manzanitas. Gratitude to Mt. Tam, to Ed and Sandy Ross, to Hoitsu Suzuki, and to life itself, which can bring such sweetness.


Hoitsu Suzuki's talk will be posted in the next week or two, here.

Of Resurrection

These last few weeks I’ve been considering a kind of paradox, one that I’m reminded of every time I walk along the shoreline here where I’ve been staying: to what lengths must we go to undo the damage we’ve done? And if to undo the damage we must use a kind of poison, are we right to play with such fire?

I’m staying on the shores of Willapa Bay, a big bay on the southern Washington coast that opens out to the Pacific, the largest bay north of San Francisco. The first time I saw this place, it stole my heart: the light on the water and sandy shoals, the birds wheeling above in the gray skies. A few years later, a village on the north shore of Willapa Bay became my refuge and occasional home.

Shoalwater, Willapa …the words soft in the mouth, sibilant like rain on water. Shoalwater Bay was the old name for the bay, back when schooners tried to thread their way forty miles from the mouth of the bay through the sand shoals and squalls and big tides to the harbor at the mouth of the Willapa River.

Back then the low hills were rich in old-growth western red cedar and hemlock, the huge, shallow bay was rich with native Olympia oysters, and the eelgrass beds nurturedmillions of young salmon. Every year hundreds of thousands of shorebirds would settle on the shoals and mudflats on their journeys to and from their breeding grounds in the north, recovering and growing strong for the next leg of their flight.

The early settlers got rich gathering up the native oysters and sending them to Gold Rush San Francisco, and by 1894, the oysters were nearly gone. The old growth lasted longer, until the mid-20^th century. Then Willapa Bay became a backwater, a quiet, poor place, left mostly to the rain and tides.

One thing still thrived and grew in the bay, a slow cancer. Back in 1894, when oyster spat was brought from the East Coast to replace the native oysters that had been decimated by over-harvesting, something else came with them. The spat were kept alive in boxes packed with moist layers of another East Coast native, Spartina alterniflora.

The Atlantic oysters failed, but the spartina thrived, growing on the sand and mud below the high tide line where the shorebirds fed, seemingly barren places that supported great life and diversity just beneath the surface. The spartina formed dense patches that trapped more sediment, converting the intertidal zone to meadow. Eelgrass beds, juvenile salmon habitat, shorebird feeding areas…all gone.

For most of its first one hundred years in the bay, the spartina spread slowly. In 1984, there were just a few hundred acres of the grass in the bay. Then it exploded, and by 2003, there were 20,000 acres of the tidelands completely dominated by the grass, and it was increasing by 20% a year. It was like a wildfire, killing everything in sight.

The cabin where I stay is close to a tidal channel that drains a large salt marsh and sand flats. Across the channel is a deserted sandy island. In the few years that I’ve been here, I watched the spartina fill in the tidelands and saltmarsh, until there was little else. I would try to dig the smaller clumps, but it was like flailing at the edges of a monstrous growth; the next year there would be even more.

I seldom saw shorebirds here, because the invertebrates they depended upon couldn’t survive amongst the spartina, and the dense growth provided cover for their predators. I knew that this was happening everywhere else in the bay, an inexorable loss, a helpless grief I felt every time I walked the shoreline.

I came back to the bay a few weeks ago. I’d been gone a long time, since late summer last year. I arrived back at Willapa in early twilight. I got out of the car, stretching cramped muscles from the long drive, and heard the thin high calls of godwits nearby. I hurried down through the beachgrass and then stood, stunned at what I saw.

The tide was low and shorebirds were everywhere, feeding, calling, flying. Plovers and sandpipers and dowitchers and dunlins, companionably chatting with one another as their bills probed the wet sand. The big shorebirds were there too: godwits and curlews and whimbrels and willets, their very names a kind of ancient poetry. I had arrived at a place I thought I knew and found it reborn, alive in a way I’d never known.

Over the next few days I visited the beach many times, each time near to tears, grateful beyond words. The water flowed smoothly between the open sand shoals, eelgrass exposed at the lowest tides. At night I heard flocks of shorebirds calling out of the dark sky as they flew, and wheeling down to land just a few hundred yards from where I lay. Brant- beautiful black geese – roosted on the island. A place that I thought I knew had been transformed, had come alive like a beautiful animal, breathing in the dark, life flowing richly in its veins.

The rebirth I saw wasn’t a fluke. It was born of hard work and controversy and a great determination to bring Willapa back to health, a valiant attempt to undo the damage that had begun nearly a century ago, and that threatened not just my little spot, but the very fabric of the bay, its rich and extraordinary ecological integrity.

It took a long time for anyone to realize that there was a problem in Willapa Bay, but when the bay began disappearing under the dark green grass, there was finally a rush to stop it. Millions of dollars of federal and state money were thrown at the problem. The biologists – some of them people I know - tried everything – digging, mowing, plowing, biocontrols…nothing worked. Finally they went to pesticides. The two that worked are called, quaintly, Rodeo and Habitat, two “less toxic”, non-bio-accumulating herbicides approved for aquatic environments. When they combined the herbicides with mowing, the spartina was killed.

In 2007 and 2008 the people with their sprays and special mowing machines came to my corner of the bay, and I watched acres of dense grass open up again. Above high tide, the native plants began to come back. And by this year, 2009, the shorebirds had their habitat back. This part of the bay teemed with life in a way I had never known. By this year, through great effort, they had reduced the spartina in the bay to less than 1000 acres.

But what about the herbicides? Even “less toxic” herbicides are still toxic to some extent. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep the spraying away from their beloved bay. Can I blame them? We’ve made so many mistakes in the past, overlooked effects we didn’t want to know or see. It’s hard even for me to write this; I feel that I’m somehow betraying my own ideals of working in harmony with the natural world.

But on the other hand, we made this terrible mess here, inadvertently. A whole system was dying – I saw it with my own eyes - a system that millions of non-human beings depended upon. I know people with cancer who did everything they could to avoid chemotherapy, as I’m sure I would. But would you withhold chemotherapy from someone if it meant a good chance of recovery? Could we have said, “Ah, too bad about Willapa Bay and its beautiful shorebirds, its salmon, its ancient harmony. Let it go.”?

There’s something beautiful about what was done here – a great effort to save a place, beyond human needs. I think that’s what moves me. Maybe we’ll find out it was a mistake. But meanwhile, I listen to the shorebirds happily feeding, and I bow to those who worked so hard to bring them back, mistaken or not: the politicians, the biologists, the humble people who walked the mud with backpack sprayers, day after day in the rain and wind. Thank you, thank you.

Naming, Seeing, Knowing

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. - Georgia O'Keefe

Three weeks ago I led a wildflower walk in the coastal hills just north of San Francisco, on a blue-skied, blue-oceaned, emerald-green-hilled California early April afternoon. A poet and Zen practitioner named Genine Lentine had asked me to lead the walk as part of a series she’d organized (Space Walks). I had said I’d be happy to lead a wildflower walk, but I wanted to do more than point out the flowers and give them names: I wanted to explore the relationships between botanical language, deeply seeing the natural world, and the flowers themselves, blooming so extravagantly in the spring wind. So that’s what we did together, a little group of people gathered on a weekday afternoon, admiring spring wildflowers and thinking together about naming, seeing, knowing.

I carried a shoulder bag full of heavy books out into the hills with us: my huge Jepson Manual of the Plants of California, my slightly smaller Flora of Marin County, a little paperback book on spring wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay area, and finally, a folded brochure of the wildflowers of the Marin Headlands. Botanizing and heavy books go together. As a child I never went anywhere without a book; as an adult I carry books into the wilderness, my keys to knowing what I see, my keys to the door of intimacy with the wild plants around me, my keys to conserving and protecting the rare plants hiding in the deserts and forests. It fits somehow with who I am, my twin passions of language and the natural world, married in the books I so willingly carry on my aching shoulders.

It was language that brought me to plants in the first place. Specifically, a little poem by Gary Snyder, read first when I was eighteen or so ("For The Children"):

To climb these coming crests, one word to you, to you and your children:

stay together learn the flowers go light

He’s speaking of knowing where we live, what we live amongst, as native people know the living world around them in deep and sensuous and essential detail. Living not on the land, but within it. I read that little stanza and knew that I wanted to “know the flowers”. I had no idea that knowing the flowers would lead to a lifelong commitment and love for the green, unspeaking world. I could never have imagined that my “knowing the flowers” would support me, literally, for much of my life.

Botanical jargon is a language of deep observation. The Inuit may have many words for different kinds of snow, but botanists have just as many elegant and exact words for the shape of a leaf or the kinds of tiny hairs on the stem of a flower. Leaves can be simple, compound, pinnate, palmate, bipinnate, tripinnate, lanceolate, oblanceolate, caudate, spathulate, acute, dentate, lobed, ovate, crenate, spinulate….these are just the words that come to mind at the moment – there are dozens more, each with a very specific meaning, a shape in the world. Hairs can be stellate, dendritic, hispid, sericeous, tomentose, glandular, postulate, puberulent…again, just a few of the words that come to mind, among many others.

This is a language of seeing, seeing made manifest on the page. When a plant is first described, formally, a description of the whole plant, from roots to stems and leaves and flowers and fruits, is written and published in Latin. Anywhere in the world, someone who knows this botanical language could make a painting from the Latin description which would strongly resemble the plant itself, enough that someone could probably match the illustration to the plant. This language, and the scientific names that go with it, is a language of seeing and knowing.

With this language, I can go anywhere in the world, look carefully at a plant, and begin to know it, begin the knowing of it. It’s just the first step, and not the only one, but it’s a great step forward into relationship.

It’s not uncommon for me to come across people who feel that classification and naming are actually a problem, a separation from the world rather than a meeting of it. What I say to them is, “When you first meet a person, you don’t know their name or anything about them. How close are you to them at that point? Then, over time, you learn not only their name but their family, the way they look when they’re sad or tired, where they went to college, the names of their children. Does this lead to great intimacy or less?”

It’s the same with plants. All that language is a bridge to intimacy, not a wall. I remember that before I began learning the names of trees, the forest was a “wall of green”. Then it became “beech, maple, oak”, and I began to see that some forests were mostly beech, others mostly oak, and that this was the land and soil itself speaking in trees. Some places say “beech”, some places say “oak”, but before I can hear that speaking, I have to know the difference between a beech and an oak.

I think there’s a notion that naming is new, a product of our scientific mania for classification, but I remember learning, years ago, that the people of the Yakama Nation in eastern Washington, whose culture is strongly tied to the root plants of the arid shrub-steppe, distinguish MORE species of biscuit-root (Lomatium) than we do, not less. It matters more – they are deeply intimate with biscuit-root, and have been for thousands of years. Names matter.

At one point on our wildflower walk, on a spectacular bluff overlooking the Pacific, I invited everyone to sit down next to a plant and look at it closely for five minutes. When we gathered again, everyone’s eyes were sparkling. Each person described something wondrous: one woman had looked closely at a poppy, and had seen the individual pollen grains dusting the base of the petals, had seen the light through the orange petals as like the light of a flickering fire; another person had looked at the long fruit of stork’s-bill, and had noticed that as it dried it curled into a fantastic parasol. Each person was amazed at the beauty and intricacy of what they had seen.

This is what I do every day that I’m out in the field, using the language that I have painstakingly learned over the decades to look closely at plants - how they grow, their leaves, their flowers, their fruits,. And from that knowledge comes the ability to name – and protect – some of the rarest plants in North America.

And joy. The joy that each person felt on the bluff that day is a joy I still feel after all these years, a joy that arises naturally in, as Georgia O’Keefe said, “seeing a flower”. I don't know what it is exactly, but try looking closely at a flower, even a humble weed in your backyard, and see what happens.

Desert Prayer

“It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

Edward Abby, Desert Solitaire


I’m working in the California desert this spring. Every day I walk across the vast landscape, through sandy washes, over rocky low hills, amongst the creosote bush and wildflowers.

The sun is bright, the wind cold, and all day long I hear the crunching of the small stones beneath my boots. Lizards scurry under shrubs when they hear me, antelope ground squirrels flick their tails, and if I’m very lucky I might see a desert tortoise, infinitely dignified and every-so-slightly comical, blinking its ancient eyes. Some days there's a river of painted lady butterflies, streaming past me from the south, alighting now and again on the tiny bright desert flowers for a sip of nectar before flying on.

I drove through the desert last December in a blinding rain, and the glorious wildflowers all around me are the fruit of those winter storms. Sometimes I walk through a sea of golden desert dandelion, splashed with the blue and purple of phacelia. The beavertail cactus is just coming into bloom, a brilliant unlikely fuchsia. Tiny white “desert stars” dot the gravels, and evening primroses of every shape and color are splashed across the landscape. It’s a paradise for these few weeks of spring.

I’m working with a team of botanists, looking for rare plants on a huge swathe of public land. We’re here because this land may end up bulldozed to make way for one of many, many solar energy projects slated for the southwestern deserts. Everything we see and document may be gone in a few years.

The work is glorious, we all agree. We work long hours but we have the joy of seeing the desert in bloom and of working in a place that feels like wilderness, miles from the nearest paved road. Most of us are tremendously concerned about global warming and climate change, and cheered by the new emphasis on alternative energy. But to see this beautiful landscape and imagine it utterly changed is painful. We walk and wonder…is it worth it? Is this the only way?

Millions of acres of public land in the southwestern deserts, much in pristine condition, are currently being identified by energy companies as potential sites for solar and wind power projects, in a kind of 21^st century gold rush. I was told that if all these permits were actually granted, more public land would be destroyed than in all the mining since the passage of the mining act in the 1800’s.

Wind power leaves some natural habitat beneath the turbines, but most solar projects need to completely flatten the landscape to provide a stable surface for mirrors or solar panels. Nothing is left except the stones and gravel. And these projects can cover many square miles of land, enough solar power to be equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Is this good? Is this bad? Some environmentalists – and the current administration in Washington - argue that these few million acres of our deserts are expendable, given the scope and scale of global warming, looming over us like a bad dream. They may be right. But how do you say that to these tortoises, to the whiptail lizards, to the painted ladies streaming across the land? What about the value of wilderness, of great open spaces of light and heat and emptiness?

Deserts have always gotten the short end of the stick. They’ve been the places we put our prisons, our bombing ranges, our landfills, our toxic waste dumps. They’re too dry for cattle, too stony to farm, too far from cities for suburbs. Most of the desert is public land, but there’s no money for the government to make on creosote bush and sunlight. Until now. And it’s a great deal for the energy companies, perhaps even what makes these huge projects feasible: rather than spend millions for private land, they can lease – and utterly alter – public land for a fraction of the cost.

“Public land” means “our land”. But no one seems to be considering yet where these projects will do the least harm, or how to plan for them on a regional scale. We do our surveys, but it’s not clear that they will have the slightest effect on the final decision. The government wants clean energy, NOW, and the desert is a long way from Washington.

So far not one major national environmental group has been willing to raise concerns about the effect of “clean energy” on desert lands. Only the tiny California Native Plant Society has stepped forward: Deserts Need Care in Rush to Clean Energy.

Last week, Senator Feinstein became the first senator to take a stand and ask for greater protection for desert lands that were specifically purchased by the public for wildlife conservation and are now being considered for solar projects: Feinstein Seeks Block Power from Public Land. I wonder whether any other legislators will be willing to join her, and whether the Department of Interior will be willing to listen.

Meanwhile, I walk through the desert, bending down to identify the small flowers, feeling the clean wind in my face, loving this place while it’s still here, knowing it may one day go to feed our great hunger for energy, like so many other places – our coal mines, our uranium mines, our oil fields, our pipelines…Even though part of my spiritual practice is to know that "all things that have a beginning have an end", still I can hope that this place, and others like it, will go on as they have for thousands of years, free of our insatiability.

Every day that I walk here I love it more, and wish for others to see it and love it as I do. Surely there’s a way to move toward more solar and wind power with less harm. Surely people can and will wake up and ask our government to care for the land that belongs to all of us, and to the plants and animals that live here, no matter how barren and empty it may seem at first glance.

That’s my prayer.